The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (11 page)

Stephie, on the other hand, has a few dreams of her own. And she doesn’t care if she gets in trouble reaching for them. Or if her unsuspecting aunt gets arrested helping her do so.

Emma will later be glad for this fascinating and brief interlude
when reunion invitations and reservations, old memories, one horrific mistake by a beloved niece, yet another emotional explosion with a sibling, and uncovering her mother’s many secrets are put on hold. She will remember Stephie’s question as one of the best, something she can repeat at dinner parties and in the lunchroom when she is trying to impress someone she has recently hired, at the next college roommate reunion or during one of the raucous Friday night wine-tasting parties at the restaurant her boss Janet’s husband owns.

And without a doubt she will never ever tell Joy or Debra where she has taken Stephie tonight. And not just because she is a great, fun and funky aunt but also because they will add this adventure to what appears to be a long list of reasons why Emma has lost her mind.

Really, Emma right now will do absolutely anything to keep from thinking about what she is supposed to do or whom she might consider calling.

“Honey, snap out of it,” Emma orders cheerfully, gently putting her fingers on Stephie’s startled eyes. “While it’s probably true that I could get busted for bringing you to this joint, the cops would be terrified to touch you—what with that orange hair, enough wire to hang an entire art gallery dangling from your face, and that black smock you have on that looks like a tablecloth from a Halloween party.”

“I’m just so excited,” Stephie admits. “I’ve heard about places like this but I had no clue there were any in Charleston. And there is no way Mom would have brought me here.”

Emma, of course, had no clue either. She is thinking it is a minor miracle that she mentioned to her boss that Stephie was dying to go to an open mic poetry night or a poetry slam or anything close to that having to do with words and spontaneity. Janet had
laughed in her face as if Emma had just fallen off a streetcar and then told her all about underground Charleston clubs.

That’s also what Stephie said every twenty minutes the first three days she’d spent walking around in a daze at Emma’s house because no one was barking at her to do something, go someplace, or act a certain way. “We’ve got to do something crazy this week, Auntie Em, we just have to,” her niece said, knowing the entire time exactly what she wanted to do and revealing only part of her plan to her auntie.

Emma’s idea of something crazy was to pick up her phone every five minutes to see if Erika had called her back. She also has been waiting for Debra to rise up from under a bush and attack her because they have not made up since the horrid phone call when Emma told her she didn’t like her very much. After that, Emma had thrown a towel over her answering machine, thinking the whole thing would disappear.

The whole thing, of course, also meaning the as yet unanswered messages from Samuel.

There were surely enough distractions to avoid all those unanswered items, with music in the house and lights on all of the time and Stephie asking if she could help with anything and wanting also to be quiet and work on her poetry.

“How can your mother be so angry about you all the time?” Emma asked innocently the second night as she ate the most delicious pepper pasta dish Stephie had made and wondered how
much she really knew about her niece and perhaps the mother of the niece as well.

“Something’s really wrong with her,” Stephie confessed. “Really. She’s always been a bit of a nutcase, but for the past few years it’s been worse.”

“How worse?” Emma wanted to know.

“Maybe she’s in menopause or something but she is just into constantly attacking whoever is in the same room with her. And I know I get edgy when I get my period but it’s like Mom’s on the rag
all
of the time.”

“That’s part of it, but to tell you the truth, she’s already passed through the center of menopause from what she’s told me,” Emma shared. “Can you hang on for another year? Maybe she’s thinking about you leaving for college and everything changing. It’s a very big deal when a daughter leaves.”

Stephie gulped down her food and quickly changed the subject as if there was something else she knew about her mother but would not share, and maybe something else, one more thing she would hopefully never have to share with the auntie who trusted her so much. Instead, she told Emma that there was something she had to say that was important. Something she had not yet told her parents or anyone but her closest friends. Something that would probably push Joy right off the edge of her postmenopausal tree branch and into some kind of hellish freefall that would alter half the world.

Stephanie didn’t want to go to a four-year state university. Instead, she wanted to go to cooking school, to become a chef, to one day open her own restaurant.

In some families, Stephie would be saying that she is pregnant and wants to keep the baby. In some families, Stephie would be saying that she has been mainlining heroin and intends to move to the seedy side of town and shoot up all day. In some families,
Stephie might be asking to take a year off and travel. All of those things might create an avalanche of stormy emotions.

But in the Gilford family the idea of going to cooking school, an accredited world-renowned cooking school even,
instead
of a full-blown South Carolina university, is a sin that may not be forgiven. For the Gilfords, Stephie may as well be a heroin-addicted, unwed mother-to-be, who is about to head out on a two-year road trip with a mess of ex-convicts who want to start a juggling school.

Stephie started to cry then and Emma got up, knelt next to her, and held her as Stephie dropped into her arms sobbing about how she might have to run away to live her own life. Emma had to bite her tongue so she would not say, “Take me with you so I don’t have to solve my own problems.”

Instead, the reliable, almost-always-emotionally-supportive-until-recently-anyway Auntie Emma Gilford dried Stephie’s tears and helped her put away the remains of the pepper pasta and clean up the kitchen. Then she grabbed a notebook and they sat together on the living room floor for hours talking about cooking schools, writing down a list of what Stephie might need to do to find the perfect one, and planning how she should immediately find a new summer job at a restaurant.

And Emma promised to help.

She promised to try and be the buffer, to stand by her niece, to lobby her parents and do whatever it took to be the one who held up Stephie and whomever else needed assistance standing, sitting, or walking throughout this process. Emma also promised herself that she would finally work up the courage to have it out with her sister about her jealousy and her controlling way of life—no matter how painful that might be.

“Closing the distance between you and your mother and her expectations won’t be easy,” Emma advised her niece. “But I will do what I can to help you.”

She wanted to cry from the center of her own uterus where the unspoken yearnings of female wanting leaned north towards her own heart. She wanted to cry from the empty nest that was part of her unfulfilled soul and scattered with nieces and nephews instead of her own children. She wanted to cry from the shared section of her life that knew exactly what it was like to sometimes feel trapped, alone and manipulated. She wanted to cry for her own years of silence, for sometimes surrendering without thought, for never asking the next question or daring to be bold enough to wear a ring in her own very lovely nose or to answer Samuel’s phone messages.

But Emma could not reach far enough into the depths of her own well of hurt and loss and longing to cry for herself. Instead, she held on to Stephie and whispered so softly that it was impossible for her niece to hear, “Thank God my sister had this child.”

So it was impossible for Emma to say no when Stephie wanted to get into this illegal club to listen to real poets and where the hostess—dressed in a floor-length denim jumper, pink tank top, blue stiletto heels and using a piece of thick brown rope for a hair ribbon—pushes their table against the wall so she can squeeze in more people.

“Full house tonight because we’re supposed to have a special guest,” the hostess not so much speaks as coos.

And then, alleluia, the show starts and all Emma can think of for the first few minutes is that she really could get arrested, and if Joy ever finds out where they are she will have a heart attack right
on the spot and, if she survives, have yet another reason to hate her. But she also thinks if she can do this—what else might she be able to do?

The show starts but Emma has a hard time watching anyone but Stephie. Stephie who seems to be in a trance as a succession of local poets stand up and read and act out their work on a stage that is nothing more than a space where four tables used to sit. The crowd is so well behaved that Emma can hear people breathing near the back door.

These people seem to love the spoken word. The adjectives of life. The narcotic swell of language. The sweet verbiage of words. The honest rhyming of the rhythms of life. Emma can see their passion rising like a fine mist throughout the entire club.

And because of this Emma suddenly sees her life as nothing but ground cover—one long stretch of green carpet that has covered her own adjectives—and she thinks it would be absolutely fabulous to be able to stand up in front of people who will listen as you share the secrets of your heart, your longings and desires, the source of your soul fire.

She cannot stop thinking about what she would say if she was on the stage and suddenly filled with everything she seems to be lacking. And when the reclusive and brilliant poet Mary Oliver appears, as if by magic, and speaks briefly to the crowd about writing, about living life as if it were a poem itself—“Breathe in every moment,” she admonishes—Emma joins the astonished crowd as it finally loses control and goes absolutely wild.

“Oh my God, Auntie Em, do you know who she is?” Stephie asks looking as if she has just seen a ghost walk right out of the brick wall. “She’s won a Pulitzer, she’s probably the greatest living poet … oh, how am I going to keep this to myself? How will I be able to walk to the car?